A Celebration for Coming Home: Roasted Beet and Herb Bechamel Lasagna

PERSEPHONE’S KITCHEN | Stories, songs and soul-infused food from the kitchen of Ms. Persephone

This lasagna comes out of the oven looking like a late-winter sunset. The roasted beets and fresh herbs take lasagna to whole new horizons.

Years ago, when the twins were about 15, we were invited to a New Year’s Eve party in my hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, where we were visiting my mother, my sisters and their families for the holidays. A friend said he would bring his guitar and we could enjoy a fun evening by the fireplace singing along. The host was making bechamel lasagna.

The combination of songs, artistic friends and lasagna seemed the right way to bring in a new year on a dark winter’s eve. When we arrived, the lasagna had just emerged bubbling from the oven. The twins went off to find the most interesting room, and just then, the host’s adult children arrived, removing scarves and hats and embracing her in hearty hugs. As she tucked her head against her son’s broad shoulder, she whispered to me, mother to mother, “It’s my way of seeing them on New Year’s Eve. They come early, enjoy my lasagna, then go off to their late night with friends. But I get to see them.”

The twins settled in with new friends by the fire, and my friend strummed his guitar and the song began. I tucked this mother’s advice in my heart. Soon, the day was coming when the twins would scatter. How, and where, would we gather when we became a different kind of family?

In my recently completed novel, Searching for Persephone, one of the sister characters announces to a man who marvels at the magical network of friends who surround her in a family of the heart that, “I always have my loved ones near. It’s because I cook.”

That lasagna was delicious, and so were the songs shared at the hearth. I’ve never forgotten it. So when I saw this recipe in The New York Times for roasted beets and herb bechamel lasagna, I suggested to my special Irish guy that we cook it together for Christmas dinner. I’d just dropped off my 23-year-old daughter for the night train to California, and her twin brother was in Phoenix packing for his move to Pasadena.

Martha Rose Shulman calls it “pink lasagna” because the beets bleed into the bechamel and the pasta as it bakes. I am keeping my cooking low-glycemic, wheat-free and gluten-free, so I used brown rice lasagna.